I will be showing some work at 555 Gallery that is familiar to some of you starting October 4 at 555 Gallery in Boston. The opening is Saturday, October 11 from 5-8 pm.

My pictures are of medical specimens, abnormalities and deformities, both human and animal, from the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia and the Spallanzini Collection in Reggio Emilia, Italy.

The Mutter Museum ones are new prints, in color and large. I don't believe I've ever shown the color ones in print form. They are from 8 x 10 inch transparencies.

The show is called "The Devil's Promenade" and features works by

Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley.

I very much hope to see you there.

October 11, 5- 8 pm.

A few weeks ago I was asked by Elin Spring if I would write a review of a show to post on her blog. I have done that, with pleasure, as her blog is wonderful and the show of photographs by Brian Kaplan is too.

The link to the review is:

Elin Spring Photography Blog

It's easy to stay humble when confronted with the issue of applying for a Guggenheim Fellowship. The subsequent rejection six months later also helps. At least it is for me as I have applied multiple times. It is a system that beats you down pretty well. Your ego would like to tell you that you are a major player. The rejected Guggenheim proposal has a way of confirming that you are not.

I applied last year, with what I thought was a strong proposal. In retrospect, of course, it looks flawed. My application is much simpler this year. Imagine being a reviewer. The panel considers about  4000 proposals. I want funds to carry out plans to photograph. Iceland, northern Scotland, coastal Italy... I want them all. It is "Please award me funds to allow me to go to these places and photograph, aerially and on the ground." Simple enough.

Going through a desk drawer just now, irony of ironies, I found this:

a postcard of Harry Callahan's, a photograph of an empty beach he made in 1972 on Cape Cod. Incidentally, he made his well known Cape Cod pictures while I was a student of his.

Harry wrote this on the back:

Postmarked 1992. So there I was, applying for a Guggenheim in 1992, 22 years ago, and here I am applying again now. 

For the Guggenheim you must submit the names of four people who will write on your behalf. 

I wrote about Harry's sponsoring me in another post, after I received a card from him ten years earlier:

Harry Callahan Postcard

Why subject myself to multiple defeats? Because I believe my work is worthy. I am photographing well, have great ideas, wonderful skills developed over 40 years of making pictures, and, although I am old, I am able physically still to do pretty much anything I want to. Finally, I believe I am making a contribution to the medium of photography that is significant. 

The Guggenheim application is due September 19, not so far away. I have been revising it and losing sleep over it for several months.

Am I hopeful? Yes. Am I resigned to failure? No, but I have a thick skin and will survive another rejection. Will I apply again? Every year I say I won't but then I do. 

I wrote this in the early summer in June and sat on it for a while. Be curious what you think.

Okay, so this is cool. I have been making pictures to be ahead of the blog so I've got current and good stuff to post. Wait a minute! This may not be good, right? Making work for the blog? What is that about? What about the prints? Aren't I a print person? Have I made the prints yet? Well, no. Change can come hard to someone my age, but I'm working on it. The Sea change is this: the new work is posted first, discussed and put out there for all to see, then later prints made perhaps out of necessity (i.e. exhibition and/or sales). A far different thing than the way it worked in my sphere of knowledge with my  colleagues or myself in the past. Humbling really, but exciting too. Reach a larger audience? Check. Prescribe the sequence in which the imagery is looked at? Check. Be able to break it down, bring out your points image by image if you want? Check. In fact words go very well here, good ones that is. 

So, my friends, this is the convention: 

Make work, make prints, get show, frame prints, hang show, everyone comes to the opening reception, because the gallery has sent them a postcard, work is liked and purchased (or not), show hangs for about a month, almost no one comes after the opening, sales die, there is some press, the show comes down and is returned to the artist.

And this is often present practice:

Make work, post work on site and in blog, create buzz or controversy or passion for work, gallery carries the work as some prints are made, sales are result. Show? Maybe but not totally necessary either. Contact with artist? Probably for the sake of sales.(Buyers like to get inside the work.) Momentum starts when a few prints are made and builds from initial blog post to whenever, a show or shows, a self published book perhaps or work held at the gallery for "after the show" sales. Most gallerists will say that the important work, i.e. sales, is done in the "back room", meaning through one to one contact with customers, past purchasers, collectors, etc. This can happen anytime.

Seems upside down somehow. Of course, what hurts is that so few will see the actual prints. This work you've slaved over, used all your experience and expertise to make so very beautiful, that is consummate and that you are proud of. On the other hand, with the click of a mouse an infinite number can see your newest and/or best work whenever you wish. All you have to do is get them to go there with a click of their mouse.

Ah, the times they are a changin.

This is the commodification of all that is art but it sure is current thinking, isn't it?

Click and Clack the Tappet Brothers on the NPR radio show Car Talk have a category called the " Non Automotive Puzzler" that ranges far and wide from anything to do with cars.

For the most part this next post is "non photographic" in that it strays from some deep and heartfelt analysis of photographers' works, or mine, for that matter. Let's  call this a "quasi photographic post" as it does contain photographs, but uses photography descriptively rather than artistically.

It concerns something that's been going on over summers for years at MIT just up the street from where I live. It is the Flea at MIT and it happens every third Sunday from April through October. A geekier, more eclectic group will not be found anywhere else. It is something and I recommend it highly.

I went yesterday. More accurately,, I stumbled across it yesterday while riding my  bike to go work out.

Need a tube for that Heathkit stereo amplifier you built in the 60's? I know just the place.

The poster is for Morning Pro Musica, the WGBH radio show I woke up to for years hosted by Robert LJ. Lurtsema. He would start his classical music show every morning with bird song at 7 am.

All that stuff (above) came out of a Mini.

Need a new (sic) computer? Just the place.

I couldn't help but notice this guy had a parrot on his shoulder. He offered to take a picture of me with his parrot:

Later that same morning  I met up with my friends Liz and Mercedes for brunch in Brookline.

After, we went to my studio to look at work then drove back to my place so I could hand over my 8 x 10 camera to these two. 

Both work in large format film so I decided they should have it instead of it sitting unused in a closet gathering dust. And yes, talk about going back a ways, that is in fact a Zone VI 8 x 10 film holder bag hanging off Liz's shoulder.

Career update on these two friends and TA's: Liz has begun printing for a show she will have next March at the Danforth Museum in Framingham, MA and Mercedes is about to load up a truck in Brooklyn for the drive to Penland in North Carolina where she will begin a three year artist in residency in September. 

That 8 x 10 Toyo Field camera brought me career-crucial pictures for 25 years. I hope it continues in Liz and Mercedes highly capable hands. I look forward to seeing what they make with it.